The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.
It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
> "The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."
Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
> "The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."
There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.
I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.
Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).
Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.
It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.
Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.
I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.
This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
My biggest concern with this policy is students somehow manipulating the school authorities to get them to consider things that other students they dislike do to constitute bullying, and therefore cane them for it. Accusations of bullying - particularly cyberbullying, which is extremely subjective and also relatively easy to fake - can themselves be a form of bullying, particularly if they result in an authority figure taking a cane to your victim.
I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment:
- it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
- the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable. And work with bullies to resolve/ease their life issues. I suspect most of them do what they do because of tough situation in family. In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation. Probably way better than showing ALL kids that violence is a fine casual way to solve issues.
Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.
Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.
There's entire classes of people who base their employment centrally around an occupation that enables their worst vices. I'd wager there's a group of people who have no interest in becoming a teacher but put corporal punishment on the table and suddenly they're interested.
Tenuous at best in many school systems where it's typically not teachers that apply corporal punishment but headmasters.
The notion that people train to be teachers followed by spending ~10 years in the system holding out for the chance to be a headmaster just so that they can beat people is a stretch.
Bound to be one or two, but there are surely better paths for a sadist - prison guard, et al.
> - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
Absolutely. I would never agree to allow teachers the ability to apply violence to my kid with no due process or proof of wrongdoing. Teachers play favorites and can be just as bad bullies as the other students. They should be able to strike my kid with "trust me bro" as proof that she did wrong? No fucking way on Earth.
Teachers where I live need, and have, the ability to apply violence to students. This is phrased as "physical restraint" and comes with extensive limitations and paperwork, the most important of which is that it is only allowed when protecting someone else.
What if one child wraps a skipping rope around another's neck and begins to choke them? Do you expect the adult staff to stand off to the side and do nothing?
As I previously mentioned, if you actually grew up in a system where corporal punishment is carried out, you would find that point two is not such a bother. No one cares whether a parent or teacher can cane them except they were in the wrong of course, perhaps because it is a culture and a shared experience and I knew a lot of children growing up who prefer the canning to other form of punishment.
I think the issue lies in your conflating caning and other forms of corporal punishment with physical harm. It is not the same as hitting a student or throwing a bottle at someone; it can be done very humanely. Sure, abuse is inevitable, and I could point to many teachers who were terrible and took out their issues on students, but such cases were easily resolved by reporting them to the principal or bringing parents to school the next day to file a complaint.
In any case, it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people.
Yup. I and all of my peers would vastly prefer to get a caning, or belting, or piping (hit with a short length of garden hose), or any other form of corporal punishment over something torturous like extra homework.
We'd watch Hollywood movies and be bewildered by the misbehavior and lack of respect shown to teachers in classrooms.
Every class has square pegs, but with strict teachers, they'd stay in line and not ruin the learning environment for the rest of the class.
Part way through high school, corporal punishment by teachers was banned nationwide, with only the headteacher allowed to administer that punishment. Since then I believe not even headteachers are permitted to strike students.
Might have been as a result of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
> it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
Bullies are generally not very intelligent. Deterrents absolutely do work if applied consistently. A society that applies corporal punishment at multiple levels, as Singapore does, strongly ingrains the idea to straighten yourself out, because there's always someone with a bigger stick.
> In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation.
In my experience, this isn't the deterrent you think it is.
Bullies certainly can be intelligent. Intelligence and sadism are orthogonal traits.
The only thing that unites bullies is the willingness to inflict misery on others. A bully could be a simple thug who uses violence because they have nothing else going for them, or a popular kid at the top of their class who manipulates others for their own amusement.
I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandalizing his car for a decade but didn't want to get in trouble.
Surely there is some irony to claiming no emotional impact while you ruminate in dreams about revenge.
I got in terrible trouble in school and did act out but never in reaction to corporal punishment. As it so happens, if you’re a boy the challenge is to take it without showing any sign of its effect.
That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.
I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]:
> In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a punishment for serious misconduct, often as a last resort.
> Based on first-hand accounts, the student typically feels moderate to acute pain for the first few minutes, depending on the number of strokes. This soon leads to a stinging sensation and general soreness around the points of impact, usually lasting for some hours; sitting down is likely to be uncomfortable. Superficial bruises and weals may appear on the buttocks and last for a few days after the punishment.
For comparison, criminals get:
> A report by the Singapore Bar Association stated, "The blows are applied with the full force of the jailer's arm. When the rattan hits the bare buttocks, the skin disintegrates, leaving a white line and then a flow of blood."
> Usually, the buttocks will be covered with blood after three strokes. More profuse bleeding may occur in the case of a larger number of strokes. An eyewitness described that after 24 strokes, the buttocks will be a "bloody mess".
> Men who were caned have variously described the pain they experienced as "unbearable", "excruciating", "equivalent to getting hit by a lorry", "having a hot iron placed on your buttocks", etc. A recipient of 10 strokes said, "The pain was beyond description. If there is a word stronger than excruciating, that should be the word to describe it".
> Most offenders struggle violently after each of the first three strokes and then their struggles lessen as they become weaker. By the time the caning is over, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock.
> The wounds usually take between a week and a month to heal, depending on the number of strokes received. During this time, offenders cannot sit down or lie down on their backs, and experience difficulties controlling their bowels.
I understand that many people feel that any form of corporal punishment is wrong. But I think it’s still important to point out that this is not the same type of caning that Singapore is (in)famous for internationally. And the BBC article, which also makes reference to judicial caning, makes no attempt to explain the difference - which to me feels rather sensationalist.
I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.
And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal
We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.
I was only punished like this once as a child. I don't remember what it was for, but I only remember the punishment. So anecdotally, it doesn't seem to work.
I'm going through this now, we don't smack our child but I do remember getting smacked when I was especially naughty, and yeah, it set me straight. I don't hate my farther for it or anything, I just understand he had to do something.
My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now, she doesn't believe in smacking so basically she just puts up with it and tries to talk to them about it and uses various strategies. Some work for a while, some don't. Sometimes she blows up anyway, which is completely normal human behavior.
I guess we're running a potentially very high consequence experiment with our children to see if talking through them and using other strategies turns them into better / equivalent humans to us without the smacking, let's see.
Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.
Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake.
I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think of a way that can have a positive effect.
Who knows? Maybe it fixed the problem but you don’t remember and now it’s just a part of your ethical framework.
Only time I got corporal punishment was when I stole a small amount of money out of someone’s backpack in school when I was 8. I haven’t stolen a thing in my life since then, like not even candy or a towel from a hotel room.
Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.
That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.
Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.
You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.
Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones. It can be percieved, it can be reasoned over, it can be handled by institutions (the individual in natural dynamics will not) and it is not societal loadbearing bug.
Many decades ago when I was still young, I was bullied and reported it to the authorities, but they didn't care beyond giving the usual empty "be nice and get along" verbiage. Ended up fighting the bully and gave him a few deep bleeding cuts with my nails. I got in trouble for it, but he never dared to touch me again.
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
> The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Why is this always painted as one individual victim having to fight/challenge their particular bully?
I remember a bunch of us kids spontaneously self-organizing in the fifth grade. After an older kid bullied a few kids at recess, a group of ten of us-- most of whom hadn't been bullied, but who obviously could be bullied-- suddenly realized we could walk over to him as a group.
He did a double take as we meandered over mumbling to each other about what our intentions were. When we got close, he then looked down nervously at his shoes. We didn't do or say anything to him. After about five seconds, we all dispersed.
This is the last resort punishment, so no, not necessarily. I'm surprised the last resort punishment isn't expulsion though, like it is in most places. I guess education is a right that can't be taken away?
I would like to know your opinions on a better one, if you have one that doesn't require several sessions with a school psychologist (I had a school psychologist at my school and she didn't do anything meaningful about bullying).
I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after?
At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small companies. Being forced to go against someone with more resources or who can inflict serious damage against the aggressor is how a lot of bullies get shut down.
I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.
We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.
The unspoken rule is that the victim must only do hand-combat. They cannot use weapon in any way. If the victim uses weapon to defend themselves, they will be in the wrong.
Life is hard for victims. They are often bullied because they are weaker. And the only way out is to do hand-combat.
Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".
I think it's important to understand why Singapore ended up where it ended after experiencing decades of multicultural violence. This guy gives a pretty good overview of why Singapore of today happened as a reaction to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxc_KDPrxM I think the modern equivalent case is probably El Salvador (can it become a new Singapore? Probably not).
Well, no, Singapore's rules on caning were inherited wholesale from its British colonial days.
"Decades of multicultural violence" is also absurd. There were indeed race riots in the 1960s, but these were closely tied to the ongoing saga of the formation of Malaysia and subsequent expulsion of Singapore, and as much political as racial (to the degree that these can be separated, since many key players like Malaysia's UMNO openly advocated for a given race).
Btw, besides using violence on school children is barbaric this action is also sexism. Young boys generally suffer more from violence. Now the teacher can add it.
Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.
When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
Regardless of what side you take, time is the judge. It does not care about what you consider right or wrong. It will show which societies will prosper and which will go extinct.
As I understand it, a lot of bullying, especially physical bullying, stems from physical abuse at home. The plan is "hey let's try double-or-nothing" on the child abuse. Great fuckin plan. When people are into this shit I hope they don't have kids man.
I find the evolution of §1631 of the German civic code interesting from 1900 to the early 2000s it slowly moved from "the father has the right to chastise the children" to "the parents have the right and obligation to bring up their children. humiliation is no appropriate means for upbringing."
so no form of violence, psychological and physical, that goes beyond merely protecting the child or it's environment from harm, is appropriate. any such acts that are covered elsewhere in the code actually turn violent into a felony: insult, beating, locking in the room, even grounding? that's not how you turn a young human into a decent adult.
the turning point btw was Astrid Lindgren of Pipi Longstockings fame, and her acceptance speech "Never Violence!" for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prestigious event with high reach in politics and intellectual elites. The speech was rocking the boat, indeed, she was asked to only hand out the prints and not actually give the speech, to not spill the event. Yet she insisted...
It does in Singapore - a province and later country that was historically rife with civil, religious, ethnic, and political instability.
Westerners may not like it, but there's a reason LKY elucidated on "Asian Values" [0]. What do you care anyhow - it's not like you'd be given PR let alone citizenship.
Singapore "rife with political instability"? We're talking about the same country that has been ruled uninterrupted since 1968 by same party, which has also retained an absolute supermajority in Parliament during that entire time, right?
The party line is that Singapore was a miserable fishing village before LKY & the PAP stepped into rescue it, and LKY doubled down on "Asian Values" to justify his iron-fisted rule: better not take any chances with that dangerous democracy! But in fact pre-WW2 Singapore under British rule was already a prosperous, advanced trading metropolis and widely considered the second wealthiest city in Asia after Shanghai.
School caning is with a lighter stick and through clothing, so it will be less severe, but the reduction in severity will probably vary a lot with the person administering the punishment.
Singapore works as a multi-ethcnic multi-cultural society because of measures like this and an understanding that you cannot have a functional democracy in a multi cultural, multi racial and a multi-ethnic society: each race/culture votes for his own and against others on racial/ethnic lines.
The only times I got hit were when I deserved it, was asking for it, and pushed that adult over the tipping point. So that was all completely just.
My peers learned they could trigger me in the same way, and were always careful to be subtle and passive, lest they also get punished. I suppose that is also, street justice.
I didn’t expect to open the comments and find people who were pro beating children on Hacker News. I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay. Absolutely barbaric behavior.
Sadly, I think you need to look at opinions outside where you live. I thought that a 6 foot 2 man smacking his child to ground so hard she couldn't hear would be a crime. Only to be told that it was only a crime if he closed his fist in Florida.
Locking people in a room also isn't pleasant, yet we allow it, because we think it has a deterring effect. Hitting people with sticks or tear gas, forcing there limbs together with steel also isn't very nice. Neither is forcing people in a plane and sending them off into dangerous environments just because they happen to be born there.
Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
What about the "barbaric" "horric" "abuse" these victims of bullying are being subjected to? Idiots siding with criminals and not victims is why society is so fucked up.
After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear.
In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.
I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.
My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.
I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.
I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.
I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.
The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.
Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.
Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.
Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?
It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."
I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.
A few days ago an older teenager tried to steal my phone on the street, I kicked the shit out of him.
What else should I have done? Just let the kid take the next guys phone?
If I’d called the police, they’d almost certainly have told me on the phone to let the shouting kid go. There would have been zero consequences for him, and possibly some for me.
Half-serious thought: Would giving them an appropriately sized dose LSD (with proper setting/supervision) or similar thing be a better alternative? If the issue is lack of empathy for others isn't this a much better solution that actually fixes the root cause instead of papering things over. Maybe caning might fix the superficial symptom, but those people may well end up as sociopath CEOs or something or find other ways to gain satisfaction from asserting their power (just look at the state of the world, you can be a "bully" in many other ways than physical ones).
Well, think of it like this: these teenagers take pleasure harming defenseless animals.
They like to torture them psychologically and physically, precisely because they are defenseless.
Well, these animals are just big animals: human.
It means: they find it fun so they actually enjoy harming humans.
This is precisely the reason for bullying.
Punishing these behaviors early, and you might actually stop this pleasure-loop and send a signal to all people around that it is a not a good idea. In addition, you may prevent escalation to worse crimes. Once you do a crime, then crime+1 is maybe ok. If crime+1 is maybe ok, then crime+2, etc.
Pithy version: Hitting kids to show them that hitting other kids is wrong?
Less pithy version: The message you send by beating kids, is that violence is wrong unless you're big and strong enough and have enough authority that nobody can stop you. This is not a good way to get kids to be less violent, it just teaches them to be more calculated in their violence.
>I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay.
This is unintentionally hilarious. You're not arguing the moral point, you're using the same kind of reasoning that leads to gay conversion therapy. It roughly equates to: "that's not in accord with my social norms, therefore you need professional intervention."
(Perfunctory disclaimer that I don't support caning. I am not arguing for it, I am only pointing out problems with a statement against it.)
Pain is a highly evolved way of telling humans to change their behavior. Why would we choose not to use such an excellent tool, within reasonable boundaries? Also, do you think the victims of bullies have a pleasant experience? Being merciful to the bullies enables them and is cruel to their victims.
Yeah its so evolved. But then why limit it to children? Why shouldn't your boss be allowed to beat the shit out of you so it sends a signal you need to change your behavior?
There is a massive leap between "let them bully other kids" and "we have to cane them" and pretending like only pain is the solution, especially in case of children where bullying is often a second order effect, is sick.
I find this attitude completely western and out of touch with culture and actual experience of people living in a society that operate differently.
In my own personal and shared experience; having grown up in a culture where corporal punishment is a given. You found out it can be administered in the most humane way possible. And as a matter of fact, a couple minute after the entire thing you are back to talking with friends and siblings and laughing it off.
Sure, I didn't love being caned, nor did anyone I knew, but I will say it was a more effective and better guide towards good behaviour than words alone or other approaches
Nobody I have met loved being canned as a child, and at the same time no one turned out worst from it.
And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
I'm certain the views of people who grew up in Africa and certain part of Asia, where caning is still practised, will be quite different from those of people who didn't.
P.S. My views are on parents and teachers caning kids or young teenagers.
>And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
And then, when they become adults...
Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?
Good. And while I know Singapore already allowed this for other misbehaviour, it should have never been removed from schools in the West in the first place, and I say this as somebody who grew up with no lack of (in hindsight deserved) swattings from teachers and principals. No doubt many problems today can be traced back to a complete failure to disciple many children that has developed over the past 20-30 years.
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
This is only half-true. Normally, the bully can escalate further than you are capable of, since they are experienced at it. Sometimes they can even get their henchmen to hold you at a distance so your resistance has no effect.
It worked for me once. I think, bullying the loser was kind of cool in front of his gang, but rolling around on the floor wrestling with a loser in front of them was not so cool. Sure, I got pulverized but he didn't try me again.
That is an anecdote though, not data. He was a small time bully, could have simply escalated to a stabbing after school and left me permanently disabled. I don't know the real answer, but telling people is a good start. Make sure people know about every incident. Don't silently suffer.
Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.
The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.
It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
> "The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."
Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
> "The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."
There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.
Expel the kid
I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
5 replies →
Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.
Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).
3 replies →
Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.
It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.
Surely expelling more effective from the school's perspective.
Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.
2 replies →
I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.
The big idea lately is to ignore all of that and just give everyone equal rights but unequal responsibilities.
Which country is that?
This sounds crazy, I know, but perhaps boys and girls are different.
When you impose gender ideology, gender roles on them from age 0, yeah you will get vastly different outcomes for boys and girls.
This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
1 reply →
Singapore already uses caning in schools, so it sounds this just extends it to be used in cases of bullying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore?useskin=ve...
I know bullies that claim that they get bullied by the person they bully. The bully stopped in the end, but the wrong person got pushed.
My biggest concern with this policy is students somehow manipulating the school authorities to get them to consider things that other students they dislike do to constitute bullying, and therefore cane them for it. Accusations of bullying - particularly cyberbullying, which is extremely subjective and also relatively easy to fake - can themselves be a form of bullying, particularly if they result in an authority figure taking a cane to your victim.
I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment:
- it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
- the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable. And work with bullies to resolve/ease their life issues. I suspect most of them do what they do because of tough situation in family. In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation. Probably way better than showing ALL kids that violence is a fine casual way to solve issues.
Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.
Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.
There's entire classes of people who base their employment centrally around an occupation that enables their worst vices. I'd wager there's a group of people who have no interest in becoming a teacher but put corporal punishment on the table and suddenly they're interested.
Tenuous at best in many school systems where it's typically not teachers that apply corporal punishment but headmasters.
The notion that people train to be teachers followed by spending ~10 years in the system holding out for the chance to be a headmaster just so that they can beat people is a stretch.
Bound to be one or two, but there are surely better paths for a sadist - prison guard, et al.
> - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
Absolutely. I would never agree to allow teachers the ability to apply violence to my kid with no due process or proof of wrongdoing. Teachers play favorites and can be just as bad bullies as the other students. They should be able to strike my kid with "trust me bro" as proof that she did wrong? No fucking way on Earth.
This comment implies that you’d okay with your child being beaten if there are strong evidence against him?
Teachers where I live need, and have, the ability to apply violence to students. This is phrased as "physical restraint" and comes with extensive limitations and paperwork, the most important of which is that it is only allowed when protecting someone else.
What if one child wraps a skipping rope around another's neck and begins to choke them? Do you expect the adult staff to stand off to the side and do nothing?
Violence as punishment is different, of course.
As I previously mentioned, if you actually grew up in a system where corporal punishment is carried out, you would find that point two is not such a bother. No one cares whether a parent or teacher can cane them except they were in the wrong of course, perhaps because it is a culture and a shared experience and I knew a lot of children growing up who prefer the canning to other form of punishment.
I think the issue lies in your conflating caning and other forms of corporal punishment with physical harm. It is not the same as hitting a student or throwing a bottle at someone; it can be done very humanely. Sure, abuse is inevitable, and I could point to many teachers who were terrible and took out their issues on students, but such cases were easily resolved by reporting them to the principal or bringing parents to school the next day to file a complaint.
In
> such cases were easily resolved
Hah!
In any case, it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people.
Yup. I and all of my peers would vastly prefer to get a caning, or belting, or piping (hit with a short length of garden hose), or any other form of corporal punishment over something torturous like extra homework.
We'd watch Hollywood movies and be bewildered by the misbehavior and lack of respect shown to teachers in classrooms.
Every class has square pegs, but with strict teachers, they'd stay in line and not ruin the learning environment for the rest of the class.
Part way through high school, corporal punishment by teachers was banned nationwide, with only the headteacher allowed to administer that punishment. Since then I believe not even headteachers are permitted to strike students.
Might have been as a result of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
Schools have gone downhill since.
> it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
Bullies are generally not very intelligent. Deterrents absolutely do work if applied consistently. A society that applies corporal punishment at multiple levels, as Singapore does, strongly ingrains the idea to straighten yourself out, because there's always someone with a bigger stick.
> In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation.
In my experience, this isn't the deterrent you think it is.
Bullies certainly can be intelligent. Intelligence and sadism are orthogonal traits.
The only thing that unites bullies is the willingness to inflict misery on others. A bully could be a simple thug who uses violence because they have nothing else going for them, or a popular kid at the top of their class who manipulates others for their own amusement.
[dead]
I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandalizing his car for a decade but didn't want to get in trouble.
Surely there is some irony to claiming no emotional impact while you ruminate in dreams about revenge.
I got in terrible trouble in school and did act out but never in reaction to corporal punishment. As it so happens, if you’re a boy the challenge is to take it without showing any sign of its effect.
These things only hurt emotionally when done wrongfully.
You’ll be happy to meet him to do what? Hit him with a ruler multiple times?
An actual cane works more like a whip and can break skin and leave permanent scars.
That'll sure teach them not to abuse their power over their fellow humans with less physical strength.
On this same topic, Texas leads the US in paddling!
> Spanking has greatly decreased in elementary schools but increased at high schools, especially in non-urban districts.
> Between 2010 and 2025, over 180 high schools reintroduced paddling —- often justified as an alternative to out-of-school or in-school suspension.
https://www.corpun.com/rtsd.htm
W.H. Auden
This seems a good place to point out that the evidence for the harmful effects of corporal punishment is very low quality: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma...
That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.
2 replies →
I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]:
> In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a punishment for serious misconduct, often as a last resort.
> Based on first-hand accounts, the student typically feels moderate to acute pain for the first few minutes, depending on the number of strokes. This soon leads to a stinging sensation and general soreness around the points of impact, usually lasting for some hours; sitting down is likely to be uncomfortable. Superficial bruises and weals may appear on the buttocks and last for a few days after the punishment.
For comparison, criminals get:
> A report by the Singapore Bar Association stated, "The blows are applied with the full force of the jailer's arm. When the rattan hits the bare buttocks, the skin disintegrates, leaving a white line and then a flow of blood."
> Usually, the buttocks will be covered with blood after three strokes. More profuse bleeding may occur in the case of a larger number of strokes. An eyewitness described that after 24 strokes, the buttocks will be a "bloody mess".
> Men who were caned have variously described the pain they experienced as "unbearable", "excruciating", "equivalent to getting hit by a lorry", "having a hot iron placed on your buttocks", etc. A recipient of 10 strokes said, "The pain was beyond description. If there is a word stronger than excruciating, that should be the word to describe it".
> Most offenders struggle violently after each of the first three strokes and then their struggles lessen as they become weaker. By the time the caning is over, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock.
> The wounds usually take between a week and a month to heal, depending on the number of strokes received. During this time, offenders cannot sit down or lie down on their backs, and experience difficulties controlling their bowels.
I understand that many people feel that any form of corporal punishment is wrong. But I think it’s still important to point out that this is not the same type of caning that Singapore is (in)famous for internationally. And the BBC article, which also makes reference to judicial caning, makes no attempt to explain the difference - which to me feels rather sensationalist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
If they like it so much, they should apply it to all kids, not just boys.
Yeah this seems like the kind of punishment that was also common in the west in 1800-1900.
I remember my parents still talking of getting hit with a ruler in the 50s tho the practice was technically forbidden since 1860 or so.
I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.
And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal
Seems like they just get what they did. To be honest, I think it should be less milder.
We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.
4 replies →
I was only punished like this once as a child. I don't remember what it was for, but I only remember the punishment. So anecdotally, it doesn't seem to work.
I was only punished like this once as a child. It was because I beat another kid and took his crayons. It worked like a charm. So YMMV.
I'm going through this now, we don't smack our child but I do remember getting smacked when I was especially naughty, and yeah, it set me straight. I don't hate my farther for it or anything, I just understand he had to do something.
My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now, she doesn't believe in smacking so basically she just puts up with it and tries to talk to them about it and uses various strategies. Some work for a while, some don't. Sometimes she blows up anyway, which is completely normal human behavior.
I guess we're running a potentially very high consequence experiment with our children to see if talking through them and using other strategies turns them into better / equivalent humans to us without the smacking, let's see.
Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.
Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake.
I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think of a way that can have a positive effect.
Who knows? Maybe it fixed the problem but you don’t remember and now it’s just a part of your ethical framework.
Only time I got corporal punishment was when I stole a small amount of money out of someone’s backpack in school when I was 8. I haven’t stolen a thing in my life since then, like not even candy or a towel from a hotel room.
Singapore also hangs people for possessing weed.
They also seem to be one of the few countries that won the war on drugs, no?
Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.
That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.
You can also to to jail for selling chewing gum. And you are legally required to flush a public toilet after using it.
Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.
You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.
This is naïve. This will just lead to the victims of bullying getting caned after the bullies set them up.
A bad person sees such a punishment as an opportunity to intimidate others.
Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones. It can be percieved, it can be reasoned over, it can be handled by institutions (the individual in natural dynamics will not) and it is not societal loadbearing bug.
No, it’s not a nice one and it can and in fact does ruin whole societies and generations of people. Here one case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
I never said its nice or justifyable. I wish there was a grown up to talk with here. I know the russian bully culture.
Stop talking down to evil people that only exist in your head.
Solution against bullies: a bigger bully.
Works really well, and doing nothing is exactly why western societies are fucked up.
New generations do whatever they want and do not face any consequences.
Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?
Many decades ago when I was still young, I was bullied and reported it to the authorities, but they didn't care beyond giving the usual empty "be nice and get along" verbiage. Ended up fighting the bully and gave him a few deep bleeding cuts with my nails. I got in trouble for it, but he never dared to touch me again.
1 reply →
>Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?
Are you a time traveller from 1900?
https://libreo.ch/revues/sjsca/20232/sjsca-29-2023/sans-foi-...
Note that it was a time of widespread caning and death penalty...
1 reply →
> Have you seen how much of a shithole France became
No, how far away should I be to see that?
Why are western countries fucked up?
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
You can never fight against a bully with words.
The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Nothing else works.
> The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Why is this always painted as one individual victim having to fight/challenge their particular bully?
I remember a bunch of us kids spontaneously self-organizing in the fifth grade. After an older kid bullied a few kids at recess, a group of ten of us-- most of whom hadn't been bullied, but who obviously could be bullied-- suddenly realized we could walk over to him as a group.
He did a double take as we meandered over mumbling to each other about what our intentions were. When we got close, he then looked down nervously at his shoes. We didn't do or say anything to him. After about five seconds, we all dispersed.
I don't remember him bullying anyone after that.
So, a regulating force must necessarily be of the same nature ?
This is the last resort punishment, so no, not necessarily. I'm surprised the last resort punishment isn't expulsion though, like it is in most places. I guess education is a right that can't be taken away?
I would like to know your opinions on a better one, if you have one that doesn't require several sessions with a school psychologist (I had a school psychologist at my school and she didn't do anything meaningful about bullying).
8 replies →
I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after?
At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small companies. Being forced to go against someone with more resources or who can inflict serious damage against the aggressor is how a lot of bullies get shut down.
I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.
We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.
> The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up
The unspoken rule is that the victim must only do hand-combat. They cannot use weapon in any way. If the victim uses weapon to defend themselves, they will be in the wrong.
Life is hard for victims. They are often bullied because they are weaker. And the only way out is to do hand-combat.
This but unironically.
I understand that caning leaves lifetime scars, at least the type I heard about. It's not something you can put weight on for a while.
This is not that kind of caning, it's basically a harder form of slapping kids, not the one they give criminals that breaks the skin.
For minors, caning is with half-inch cane, which is the only one available in supermarkets. Only judicial caning is with the inch cane.
It depends. For some, yes. For most, no.
Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".
It's a matter of degree.
Life time physical or emotional scarring would, to pull out an example, be US slavery degree.
I grew up when corporeal punishment was a thing in schools. No physical or emotional scars.
Wish this is extended to white collar crimes.
I think it's important to understand why Singapore ended up where it ended after experiencing decades of multicultural violence. This guy gives a pretty good overview of why Singapore of today happened as a reaction to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxc_KDPrxM I think the modern equivalent case is probably El Salvador (can it become a new Singapore? Probably not).
Well, no, Singapore's rules on caning were inherited wholesale from its British colonial days.
"Decades of multicultural violence" is also absurd. There were indeed race riots in the 1960s, but these were closely tied to the ongoing saga of the formation of Malaysia and subsequent expulsion of Singapore, and as much political as racial (to the degree that these can be separated, since many key players like Malaysia's UMNO openly advocated for a given race).
Btw, besides using violence on school children is barbaric this action is also sexism. Young boys generally suffer more from violence. Now the teacher can add it.
Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.
Just stupd
When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
lol, standard practice in schools where I grew up, though not with a wooden rod but the wooden back of the blackboard duster.
1 reply →
Regardless of what side you take, time is the judge. It does not care about what you consider right or wrong. It will show which societies will prosper and which will go extinct.
As I understand it, a lot of bullying, especially physical bullying, stems from physical abuse at home. The plan is "hey let's try double-or-nothing" on the child abuse. Great fuckin plan. When people are into this shit I hope they don't have kids man.
Caning proven to work.
For what, administered by who?
this does seem like an "I learned it from watching you" moment.
beat the violence out of them, that'll show em?
I find the evolution of §1631 of the German civic code interesting from 1900 to the early 2000s it slowly moved from "the father has the right to chastise the children" to "the parents have the right and obligation to bring up their children. humiliation is no appropriate means for upbringing."
so no form of violence, psychological and physical, that goes beyond merely protecting the child or it's environment from harm, is appropriate. any such acts that are covered elsewhere in the code actually turn violent into a felony: insult, beating, locking in the room, even grounding? that's not how you turn a young human into a decent adult.
the turning point btw was Astrid Lindgren of Pipi Longstockings fame, and her acceptance speech "Never Violence!" for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prestigious event with high reach in politics and intellectual elites. The speech was rocking the boat, indeed, she was asked to only hand out the prints and not actually give the speech, to not spill the event. Yet she insisted...
Never Violence! - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Violence!
> beat the violence out of them, that'll show em?
It does in Singapore - a province and later country that was historically rife with civil, religious, ethnic, and political instability.
Westerners may not like it, but there's a reason LKY elucidated on "Asian Values" [0]. What do you care anyhow - it's not like you'd be given PR let alone citizenship.
[0] - https://time.com/archive/6732416/in-defense-of-asian-values-...
Singapore signed the UN CRC Convention on the rights of the Child
So Singapore committed to protect children from violence
https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rig...
And it seems Singapore (like some other countries) struggles to figure what that actually means, come to think about it.
Singapore "rife with political instability"? We're talking about the same country that has been ruled uninterrupted since 1968 by same party, which has also retained an absolute supermajority in Parliament during that entire time, right?
The party line is that Singapore was a miserable fishing village before LKY & the PAP stepped into rescue it, and LKY doubled down on "Asian Values" to justify his iron-fisted rule: better not take any chances with that dangerous democracy! But in fact pre-WW2 Singapore under British rule was already a prosperous, advanced trading metropolis and widely considered the second wealthiest city in Asia after Shanghai.
the point. of course. is to teach. that nothing is good or bad. consequences.
I wonder how severe a caning in an educational institute compares to one administered by state justice.
Adult caning is done by trained professionals. https://transformativejusticecollective.org/2023/10/20/getti...
School caning is with a lighter stick and through clothing, so it will be less severe, but the reduction in severity will probably vary a lot with the person administering the punishment.
Trained Professionals -> Goons exercising the states monopoly on force. Ftfy.
1 reply →
Singapore works as a multi-ethcnic multi-cultural society because of measures like this and an understanding that you cannot have a functional democracy in a multi cultural, multi racial and a multi-ethnic society: each race/culture votes for his own and against others on racial/ethnic lines.
The only times I got hit were when I deserved it, was asking for it, and pushed that adult over the tipping point. So that was all completely just.
My peers learned they could trigger me in the same way, and were always careful to be subtle and passive, lest they also get punished. I suppose that is also, street justice.
[flagged]
[flagged]
I didn’t expect to open the comments and find people who were pro beating children on Hacker News. I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay. Absolutely barbaric behavior.
Sadly, I think you need to look at opinions outside where you live. I thought that a 6 foot 2 man smacking his child to ground so hard she couldn't hear would be a crime. Only to be told that it was only a crime if he closed his fist in Florida.
Locking people in a room also isn't pleasant, yet we allow it, because we think it has a deterring effect. Hitting people with sticks or tear gas, forcing there limbs together with steel also isn't very nice. Neither is forcing people in a plane and sending them off into dangerous environments just because they happen to be born there.
Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
2 replies →
I'm sure there are a few such comments, since you say so, but I read most of the thread and didn't see any.
What about the "barbaric" "horric" "abuse" these victims of bullying are being subjected to? Idiots siding with criminals and not victims is why society is so fucked up.
> who were pro beating children
Correction: pro beating abusers.
After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear. In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.
I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.
My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.
I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.
I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.
I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.
The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.
Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.
Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.
Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?
It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
16 replies →
My sister had an interesting take on this:
"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."
I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.
3 replies →
A few days ago an older teenager tried to steal my phone on the street, I kicked the shit out of him.
What else should I have done? Just let the kid take the next guys phone?
If I’d called the police, they’d almost certainly have told me on the phone to let the shouting kid go. There would have been zero consequences for him, and possibly some for me.
I genuinely did that kid a favour.
In Germany you can force somebody to stay until police arrives but unnecessary violence is forbidden
6 replies →
Half-serious thought: Would giving them an appropriately sized dose LSD (with proper setting/supervision) or similar thing be a better alternative? If the issue is lack of empathy for others isn't this a much better solution that actually fixes the root cause instead of papering things over. Maybe caning might fix the superficial symptom, but those people may well end up as sociopath CEOs or something or find other ways to gain satisfaction from asserting their power (just look at the state of the world, you can be a "bully" in many other ways than physical ones).
>beating children
>I find this abuse horrific
>barbaric behavior.
Absolutely! We're all against bullying here.
Well, think of it like this: these teenagers take pleasure harming defenseless animals.
They like to torture them psychologically and physically, precisely because they are defenseless.
Well, these animals are just big animals: human.
It means: they find it fun so they actually enjoy harming humans.
This is precisely the reason for bullying.
Punishing these behaviors early, and you might actually stop this pleasure-loop and send a signal to all people around that it is a not a good idea. In addition, you may prevent escalation to worse crimes. Once you do a crime, then crime+1 is maybe ok. If crime+1 is maybe ok, then crime+2, etc.
Pithy version: Hitting kids to show them that hitting other kids is wrong?
Less pithy version: The message you send by beating kids, is that violence is wrong unless you're big and strong enough and have enough authority that nobody can stop you. This is not a good way to get kids to be less violent, it just teaches them to be more calculated in their violence.
1 reply →
Most bullies are responding to a poor home life where they are bullied and beaten.
[dead]
>I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay.
This is unintentionally hilarious. You're not arguing the moral point, you're using the same kind of reasoning that leads to gay conversion therapy. It roughly equates to: "that's not in accord with my social norms, therefore you need professional intervention."
(Perfunctory disclaimer that I don't support caning. I am not arguing for it, I am only pointing out problems with a statement against it.)
[flagged]
Pain is a highly evolved way of telling humans to change their behavior. Why would we choose not to use such an excellent tool, within reasonable boundaries? Also, do you think the victims of bullies have a pleasant experience? Being merciful to the bullies enables them and is cruel to their victims.
Yeah its so evolved. But then why limit it to children? Why shouldn't your boss be allowed to beat the shit out of you so it sends a signal you need to change your behavior?
There is a massive leap between "let them bully other kids" and "we have to cane them" and pretending like only pain is the solution, especially in case of children where bullying is often a second order effect, is sick.
4 replies →
[flagged]
17 replies →
I find this attitude completely western and out of touch with culture and actual experience of people living in a society that operate differently.
In my own personal and shared experience; having grown up in a culture where corporal punishment is a given. You found out it can be administered in the most humane way possible. And as a matter of fact, a couple minute after the entire thing you are back to talking with friends and siblings and laughing it off.
Sure, I didn't love being caned, nor did anyone I knew, but I will say it was a more effective and better guide towards good behaviour than words alone or other approaches
Nobody I have met loved being canned as a child, and at the same time no one turned out worst from it. And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
I'm certain the views of people who grew up in Africa and certain part of Asia, where caning is still practised, will be quite different from those of people who didn't.
P.S. My views are on parents and teachers caning kids or young teenagers.
>And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
And then, when they become adults...
Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?
1 reply →
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
If you follow the article link they reference a WHO (another UN organization) report regarding their position and review of research:
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/B09424
Propaganda.
Thanks.
I wonder how many would get accustomed to the pain, or may even develop a liking for it. BDSM is a thing, after all...
Good. And while I know Singapore already allowed this for other misbehaviour, it should have never been removed from schools in the West in the first place, and I say this as somebody who grew up with no lack of (in hindsight deserved) swattings from teachers and principals. No doubt many problems today can be traced back to a complete failure to disciple many children that has developed over the past 20-30 years.
That's pretty dumb
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
This is only half-true. Normally, the bully can escalate further than you are capable of, since they are experienced at it. Sometimes they can even get their henchmen to hold you at a distance so your resistance has no effect.
It worked for me once. I think, bullying the loser was kind of cool in front of his gang, but rolling around on the floor wrestling with a loser in front of them was not so cool. Sure, I got pulverized but he didn't try me again.
That is an anecdote though, not data. He was a small time bully, could have simply escalated to a stabbing after school and left me permanently disabled. I don't know the real answer, but telling people is a good start. Make sure people know about every incident. Don't silently suffer.
I don't fully disagree, but the bullying will not stop if they see that they can beat you up easily. It might even get worse.
Violence creates more violence. Singapore has a lot of these sick backwater policies in place.
If that were true Singapore would be a particularly violent place, it's not. Source: I lived there.
Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.
> Violence creates more violence
Citation needed (specifically in the case of discipline)